TED Video: Mark Bittman on what's wrong with what we eat

Tangy Baked Beans

Serves 2-4

Ingredients

½ cup onion, diced
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 ½ cups water
¼ cup apple cider vinegar
2 cups cooked pinto beans
2 tbsp real maple syrup
¼ cup collard greens, kale or mustard greens, stem removed and chopped
2 tsp kosher salt
1 tsp pepper
2 tbsp hot sauce
¼ cup ketchup
1 tbsp Dijon mustard
1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce

Directions

Heat the oven to 375 degrees.

Put beans in a small baking dish or divide into 2 french onion soup crocks.

In a medium sauce pan, sauté onions in olive oil over medium heat until soft, about 3 minutes.  Add garlic and cook until fragrant, one minute.  Add 2 ½ cups water and remaining ingredients except beans and bring to a boil.  Reduce heat to a simmer and cook for 15 minutes.  Pour liquid over beans to cover by about ½ inch.  Cover dish with foil and bake for 45 minutes.  Remove foil, and if necessary add more liquid to cover.  Bake for an additional 30 minutes.

Allow to cool 10 minutes then serve.

Easiest Tomato Soup

Soup doesn't have to be complex to be delicious.  After all, it is a very humble food.  It's eaten by both rich and poor in almost every culture around the world.  Sometimes less is more, and this soup is a perfect example.  This soup uses only a few ingredients to create one of the most comforting foods I can think of.

Serves 3-4

Ingredients

1/2 cup onion, diced
4 garlic cloves, sliced
1 - 28oz can of whole peeled tomatoes in tomato juice, preferably organic
2 cups water
pinch of red pepper flakes
salt and pepper to taste
14 leaves fresh basil, chiffonade or chopped
olive oil

Directions

Sweat onion in olive oil with some salt over medium-high heat until translucent, 4-6 minutes.  Add garlic and cook until fragrant, about one minute.  Add tomatoes with juice, water and red pepper flakes being sure to break up the tomatoes with a wooden spoon.  Bring to a boil then reduce to a simmer.  Simmer uncovered for one hour.  Puree with blender or immersion blender.  Adjust seasonings, add basil and serve with a drizzle of olive oil over each bowl.  Serve with crusty bread or grilled cheese.

Heirloom Tomato and Pesto Salad

This weeks farmers market was filled with tomatoes!  All shapes and sizes were represented with a ton of heirloom varietals.  The vast array of tomatoes inspired me to make a salad that really celebrates the season.  These tomatoes are easily twice as good as anything you could find at the supermarket and worth seeking out.  For this recipe the more colors, the more variety, the better your salad will look and taste.  My suggestion is to visit the local farmers market or even better, pick some tomatoes from your own garden.  Tomatoes from Florida ripened with ethylene gas just aren't going to cut it here.  One taste of this salad and you're sure to be making it again and again. Here are a few shots from Sunday morning at our Denver Farmers Market:

Serves 2-4

Heirloom Tomato and Pesto Salad


Ingredients


4-5 of the best tomatoes you can find
1/4 cup of your favorite pesto, homemade

Directions


Dice tomatoes with a sharp knife, doing your best not to squish them.  In a medium bowl, mix in pesto.

Serve immediately.

The Best Zucchini

Squash season is upon us.  Since we'll soon have more of these than we know what to do with, I figured I'd offer up a great way to cook zucchini that I cook over and over again. The idea here is to keep the texture of the zucchini while still getting a nice sear on it.  This is one of my theories as to why so many people love grilled zucchini, because there is almost no way it can get soggy.  If you cook with high enough heat and be sure not to crowd, you'll get the same affect in the pan.  This recipe is incredibly simple and is one of my favorite ways to prepare this vegetable. 

Serves 2

Ingredients

1 small to medium zucchini, thinly sliced
2-3 tbsp olive oil
salt to taste
fresh ground pepper
1/2 tsp good paprika



Directions

Heat oil over medium-high heat until shimmering.  Add zucchini to the pan making sure almost all slices have surface contact to the pan.  Add salt but don't stir.  When zucchini slices are just beginning to turn brown(1-3 minutes), flip them over.

Let them cook for 1 more minute, then stir in paprika and pepper and cook 30 more seconds.  Remove from heat.  Serve hot.

Beer Craving Website Launch!

I've been working on a new website called BeerCraving.com for a few months now.  The website is a photo gallery of what some are calling "suds porn."  It's a way to catalog all your beer conquests around the world and share them with a community of beer enthusiasts.  Each photo links you to more information about a particular beer.  It's pretty addicting, especially for all the tastespotting.com and foodgawker.com fans out there.  Here is a screenshot of it:

Earth Worms

We just added some red wiggler worms to our garden to help out with the extremely sandy soil.  As mentioned in a previous post, the soil in our garden may have never seen much love from anyone.  We've added a ton of compost but it has begun to get quite expensive.  While searching for a solution to this problem,  we've decided to go back to the basics.  Worms may be the ultimate composter and nutrient supplier out there.  They're able to consume 4 to 6 times their own body weight each day and reproduce fairly quickly.  They process what is typically seen as garbage and convert it to "black gold".  While supplying plants with incredible nutrients, they also help to aerate the soil allowing for better root growth.

We've added about 200 worms to our garden and bought a home worm composter with 2000 worms to help with our food scraps.  We'll add the worm castings and worms to our garden as time goes on and the soil is able to support more life.  There are some things we feel that nature got right in the first place.  This is exactly why we've opted to fertilize our garden using worms rather than some chemical like miracle gro.  We've also added flowers around the perimeter of the garden to help attract bees.  I'll keep you updated on our progress.  So far so good though.  Things are flourishing even in what you can barely call soil.